Comments about ‘NSA contractor says he leaked surveillance data’

This may be the early 1950s when government overreacted in people’s
personal and business lives. Our government is telling us to not take too much
sugar, use too much water, carbon footprints, and on and on. They will measure
our soft drink cup to see if we are over 16 ounces at a time. They don’t
listen to the Russian government who told us the Boston Marathon bomber would be
someone to look at. They didn’t do that at the time and he was able to
continue his plan instead of being interrupted. We have the millions of calls a
day that seems to be a lot and the government tells us we don’t need to
worry about that as they wouldn’t put good people under suspicion, only
right-wing leaning people at this time. They have made jobs for the people that
do this monitoring and you don’t think they have a program for picking out
specific words, phrases, and thoughts and intent from calls? The lady that had
a secret government e-mail is now working for Apple.

Google already has an inside track with this administration and knows very
personal information about people. Google knows how to extract the information
and under government contract could provide gigabytes a second to the government
in an instant. The phone companies require our citizens to pay the most of any
country for giving them our vital information and use their services. That
comes from use and government taxes and fees imposed on us. We pay it, gladly,
to have our devices.

Again, if Hitler were alive now, he
wouldn’t have to go through his big process of identifying a certain group
of people. He could use the databases with his SS people and even pick up the
water glasses, straws, or napkins of the people he suspected for their DNA and
ethnicity data. Stalin would be right behind in that process from the 1940s and
1950s. Kruschev tried cleansing the Ukraine area. We have a history in Africa
and Asia of similar types of cleansing of people and their beliefs.

We must be ready for that in our country since we have so much time for sports
and recreational activities in all places and locations with Internet available.

Government can be invasive and intrusive. The Tea-Party and conservative groups
have found that out and that wasn’t from DNA but from e-mails, requests
from the government for very much information on their thoughts, inner thoughts,
prayers, what they read, who they see, what they do during the day, and the list
goes on.

The person that picked up the snake on the top of the cold
mountain took a chance but the snake was so persuasive to get help. Then at the
bottom, when the snake bit the man and the snake said you knew what I was when
you picked me up, is a very good warning to all about government’s
ability. When in the wrong hands of people who are to represent us it is vital
for us to know these government officials and their intents for us.

Descriptions of this Snowden chap bounce between traitor and hero, and pretty
much nowhere in between. I'm not sure. I do value my privacy; safety is
kind of nice, too. I wonder how we would have felt about this right after 9/11,
when the 'war on terror' was declared. How would we have reacted to
the NSA telling us then, in an era when bill o'reilly was telling us to get
behind the president and shut up, that it was going to mine metadata from your
phone calls?

Ben Franklin made it very clear that a people who will trade freedom for safety
doesn't deserve their liberty. From examples in history of tyrants, in the
long run, more people are killed or persecuted with the loss of their freedoms
than would ever be killed under the pretense of stringent safety measures.

The official explanation is that the Feds aren't looking at CONTENT.Well, when it comes to e-mails we know that isn't true. And the new sky
center at point-of-the-mountain is a testament to the effort to listen in on
CONTENT of cell phone calls.The snooping IS happening, and it's
happening on domestic communications.And we didn't sign up for this
wholesale screening.Let's hope our politicians shut it down. The
timing is in our favor given the recent headlines about the IRS and delving into
reporters' communications.

It seems naïve to think any of us have privacy or that some other
government in the world is less invasive than ours. Who does he think the good
guys are? The same government in Hong Kong who is protecting him is also spying
on him and everyone else. I don't see anything "grave" or
surprising about it.

"...On Fox and Friends on Monday, Ralph Peters railed that Snowden's
true motive was to be stylish. "Now you’ve got this 29-year-old high
school dropout whistleblower making foreign policy for our country, our security
policy," he said. "It’s sad, Brian. We’ve made treason cool.
Betraying your country is kind of a fashion statement. He wants to be the
national security Kim Kardashian... I mean, we need to get very, very serious
about treason. And oh by the way, for treason — as in the case of Bradley
Manning or Edwards Snowden — you bring back the death
penalty."...".

Snowden released no information that should be classified. If our phone records
and emails are being seized and searched, then we have the right to be presented
with the warrant prior to that search.

What Snowden has done is
revealed the federal government's violation of the law, and it was the
right thing to do. He made himself a public informant, at great risk, but he has
not committed treason, or any other crime. There was no sensitive classified
information in what he released. Our county has not been compromised. The only
ones put at risk are himself, and the ones who are violating the 4th amendment,
and they should be prosecuted.

Snowden is as much a hero as any
member of the armed forces, who puts his life in the line of fire for his
country.